CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Aleksejs Histjajevs, Director at Dyninno India
Ques 1: Tell us about your journey with Dyninno Group. You started as a travel agent, and today you lead entire India operations. This must have been a roller coaster ride. What have been your main learnings from this experience?
My journey with Dyninno has been enthralling, to say the least. I started in 2011 as a travel agent in Latvia, Europe. At Dyninno, we are more talent-driven rather than tenure-driven. Having achieved my key targets in a short time, I quickly rose to become a team leader and also started training new hires. Since Dyninno offers employees an opportunity to work across locations, I was offered the role of an assistant manager at the Philippines office in 2015. I helped Dyninno develop and scale its operations at the Philippines location for around two years. After completing the Philippines project, I returned to Latvia and took over as operations manager for our UK project. As I mentioned that we are talent-driven at Dyninno, and my track record of working with multi-stakeholders and across geographies added to my profile, I was assigned the responsibility of establishing and scaling Dyninno’s operations in India in 2019. Since every market is different, I’d say my learning has been immense. I learnt that we need to ask enough questions because you must be a great student to be a good leader. Being selfaware and open to change can do wonders for your career. I also learnt that we need to invest in people. A people-first organisation creates a distinction for itself.
Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that a lot of people do not ask questions mainly because of the fear of sounding silly; another reason is that they think they are smart enough to figure everything out independently. There is a flaw in both approaches. The former lets you remain ignorant, the latter might help you reach the results, but you could have achieved them even faster had you asked someone in the first place. It is also crucial to spend quality time with quality people to ensure incessant mutual learning. If you think you’re the smartest person in a room, then most definitely you are in the wrong room. One must surround themselves with people who challenge us to do better and be better. After all, the brain is also a muscle which needs to continue working out for its development.
Ques 2: When did you come to India and what have been the challenges in building and scaling a team of around 600 employees?
I came to India in 2019 and we started operations in October – a few months before the nationwide lockdown induced by the pandemic. It was a challenging and unpredictable time. Travel is our flagship business division and globally this industry was badly hit.
What helped us navigate this situation was reliance on in-house tech competence that enabled us to maneuver the business direction and focus on airline sectors that were still operational. We had also hired some exceptional local talent by then who helped us continue growing and hiring even during the pandemic. A team that started with a handful of people in 2019, today stands at a robust 600 across departments spanning sales, customer support, tech product development, quality analysis among others.
Another challenge was gaining the trust of local talent and establishing Dyninno India as a stable and growth-oriented employer of choice. It did not matter that we were an 18-year-old global organisation with a footprint across several countries. The local talent market was skeptical as we were in the mid of a pandemic and were a completely new name in the Indian market.
The fact that we managed to grow by such a huge number was because we were able to earn the trust from the local talent. It took us a little over three years including the pandemic, but Dyninno India has established itself as an employer of choice, which helped us grow from a handful of people to around 600 employees. We retained talent by showing our employees who we are as an employer. We were able to show them how we care for them through competitive remuneration, unlimited incentive opportunity, compassionate policies and great benefits like accident and life insurance. We wanted them to come to work excited and all the hard work that we did throughout the years is the fuel that is driving our scale-up.
Ques 3: Tell us more about Dyninno’s presence in India. What are the plans for the Indian market?
Dyninno India is part of the global Dyninno Group of companies that provides products and services in the travel, finance, entertainment, and technology sectors in 50 markets. Globally, the Dyninno Group employes 5,400 people across 23 offices around the world. Its key brands include Asaptckets, Skyluxtravel, International Travel Network, Creditprime, Multipass, allcasting, and Kidscasting.
Dyninno India began operations in 2019 at DLF Cyber City, Gurugram, Haryana. It operates in two sectors – Travel and Information Technology. The travel division operates in the B2B and B2C segments and provides a range of travel products and services to a global customer base. Dyninno India’s IT division – Dynatech – acts as the IT centre for the entire Dyninno Group. Dynatech is responsible for functions from product development, marketing, and design to technical support and maintenance for all Dyninno brands.
We currently have 600 employees at our Gurugram office and plan to open more offices in Gurugram, Mumbai and Bangalore to expand our presence in India.
Ques 4: What is the latest disruption in the Travel industry and how is your company staying relevant?
Answer: Dyninno’s travel division Trevolution Group has implemented new distribution capabilities (NDC) in its ticket distribution by partnering with AirGateway, a world-leading NDC aggregator. This will provide us access to aggregated NDC content of 25+ airlines, including several major airlines. Following this, a highly specialized, local NDC Team of Excellence is being built in India.
To fully leverage the benefits of NDC, a significant infrastructure investment is required. We believe that NDC is critical to the advancement of travel retailing, and are therefore building an internal, highly specialized NDC team, consisting of seasoned engineers and business analysts. Our IT team in India has been successfully working with breakthrough innovation and technological solutions. It is the main reason why we saw India as the perfect physical base for our global NDC team.
NDC is a travel industry standard used by airlines, aggregators, and travel sellers for distributing and selling flight content. The benefits of full integration of NDC include transparent data sharing and better pricing structures, and bringing retail capabilities to life through dynamic and more personalized content.
The benefits of using NDC content are clear – it allows for control, pricing, and inventory ability, and with NDC, we will be able to give real-time offers to passengers at a cheaper rate. This, however, requires significant infrastructure investment. We are ready to invest in the future. While doing so, we will be able to provide our clients with more customized offers. We estimate to facilitate over 180,000 bookings within the first year alone and aim to strategically grow our NDC portfolio.
Ques: How do you identify the right candidate when hiring in the vast and diverse Indian market?
Dyninno’s DNA is such that most of our leadership has grown from within. Just like me, many of the other senior people at Dyninno started at entry-level positions and grew through the ranks. So, when we speak to prospective candidates while hiring, we look for traits that would help them grow within the system. I look for people who want to learn and grow, who are not afraid of asking questions till they finally figure things out. At Dyninno, you can be yourself. We are an equal opportunity employer and the only thing that matters to us is your work ethic, student mentality and a positive attitude.
We give opportunities to non-experienced candidates. Even if a candidate does not have industry experience but fits in to the skill requirement of the role and has cultural fitment, we consider them for hiring. We are tapping into the pool of candidates who have just entered the industry but are passionate and aspirational with the right skill sets. We take the help of a hiring tool – Test Gorilla – which is an online assessment platform that provides pre-employment tests and assessments to help us evaluate and hire the right candidates. It offers a wide range of tests designed to assess various skills and abilities, including cognitive abilities, technical knowledge, personality traits, and job-specific skills. We have also identified a set of competencies, skills and personality types for job roles and use our online assessment tool to evaluate candidates. Shortlisted candidates then meet the team for an interview for culture fitment assessment. This blended approach has helped us in tapping the vast talent base of fresh candidates looking out for a career.
Ques: How does Dyninno leverage technology to enhance customer experience?
Dyninno’s in-house tech competence is the heart and soul of our market leading tech solutions in travel, finance and entertainment. Globally, we have a team of over 300 tech professionals who work closely with our various lines of business to develop products that solve complex business challenges.
We are a tech company which from its early conception realized that technology is the future. Therefore, we wanted to build our own in-house tech team, which would give us the ability and edge to develop our tech products. Any vector or any business direction that we want, we can maneuver in that direction, courtesy our tech competence.
This ability to be dynamically innovative (by the way, Dyninno is a portmanteau of the words dynamic + innovations) gives us competence in all our lines of business. Thanks to that, casting professionals quickly find true talent, travelers get the best ticket prices for flights from over 70 airlines in a fraction of a second, and clients have access to loan products and financial instruments in just one click from anywhere in the world.
